Cape Town is justly known for its plethora of gold-plated hotels and jet-set living. Its beaches are some of the most well-known in the world: places where you can stretch out and people watch, enjoy the sunsets or just chill. But Alice Fisher goes in search of a quieter beach, where she communes with nature.
Sandy Bay, located 10 miles south of Cape Town via a road that takes you under the watchful gaze of the Twelve Apostles, formed by the backbone of an ancient mountain peak, is simply sensational.
It is this scenery - the steep, green, wild majesty of the Twelve Apostles - that prepares you for the ultimate beach experience. The road loops above Llandudno, and if you enter the upper part of the village, signs lead you to a car park. A rough track runs sinuously along the hillside, away from civilisation.
This beach is pure escapism. Not a building or postcard vendor in sight.
Some love Cape Town's Clifton beaches, flocked with gliterrati on any given weekend, or the trendy beachstrip of Camps Bay. But what I love most is Sandy Bay. It's a plage sauvage, Cape Town's most Elysian place of beauty, a small and stark place, drenched in eternal sunlight, the clefts in its hills choked with milkwood trees, descending to voluptuous Tippex-white dunes, and below that its isolated yawn of breadcrumb sand as white as snow and its ocean bottle-green and frigid. The Agulhas current brings freezing water from Antarctica so its an unexpected, and pleasant surprise, to find the ocean so cold on such hot days.
There are huge granite boulders, sensuously shaped and rosy in the afternoon sun. The mountain range rises steeply. Sandy Bay is home to a nudist colony who love the great outdoors. But there's plenty of room if you're not a nudist. The beach is flanked by woodland and dunes and rocky platforms ideal for sunbathing or slipping into the sea. It seems, to me, the perfect place to bring someone to propose to them. If a friend of mine who had never visited South Africa before arrived at Cape Town Airport, I would whisk them straight here to show them this crème de la crème of beaches. Or if I wanted to regale someone special, this location, and a bottle of champagne on ice, would be perfect.
